The invention relates to a hinge for the hanging of flush overlay or lipped doors on a cabinet carcase, the hinge having a door-related part attachable to the door, which is coupled through an articulation, preferably a four-joint or crosslink articulation, to a carcase-related part in the form of an elongated supporting arm which in turn is secured at at least one point to a mounting plate fastened to the supporting wall of a cabinet carcase against lifting away from the mounting plate and is made adjustable, by means of an adjusting screw thrusting against the supporting arm or mounting plate at a distance from the point of fastening to the supporting arm, with regard to the overlap or coverage dimension of the door on the front edge of the supporting wall.
Such hinges, which are invisible when the door is closed, are in widespread use in modern furniture construction, especially in connection with the above-mentioned flush overlay or lipped doors, because the action of their articulation produces the movement of the door with a pronounced component that draws the whole door away from the front edge of the carcase wall at the beginning of the opening movement, which is needed for this kind of door. That is to say, when a door hung on a cabinet carcase with this kind of hinge is opened, the inside face of the door, which is lying flat against the front edge of the supporting wall in the closed state, at first lifts sharply away from the edge of the supporting wall, while the actual swinging movement of the door to the open position does not begin to any great extent until the door is sufficiently far away from the front edge to be able to open without interfering with the door of a directly adjacent cabinet or cabinet compartment. At the same time, these hinges are adjustable in at least two--often three--directions approximately at right angles to one another, so as to permit the precise alignment of the door with the corresponding cabinet carcase and, in some cases, also with adjacent doors (of other compartments). These adjustments relate on the one hand to the tight engagement of the inside face of the door with the front edges of the side walls, and in some cases with the bottom and top of the carcase, and on the other hand to the so-called overlap or coverage dimension, i.e., the dimension by which the inside face of the door overlaps the front edge of the supporting wall. These adjustments are made possible by securing the hinge's supporting arm on a mounting plate fastened to the supporting wall, in such a manner as to be displaceable longitudinally and fixable at any longitudinal position, and on the other hand by securing the supporting arm on the mounting plate such that its front end adjacent the door can be angled with respect to its carcase-internal end and locked in selectable angular positions. When the overlap dimension of a door hung with such a hinge on a cabinet carcase is adjusted, however, the above-described hinge articulation has the effect that, without a simultaneously performed longitudinal adjustment, the distance between the inside face of the door and the front edge of the supporting wall is altered, such that an increasingly large gap forms between the inside face of the door and the front edge of the supporting wall as the hinge is increasingly adjusted to reduce the overlap or coverage dimension. The reason for this undesirable widening of the gap lies in the fact that the shifting of the supporting arm of the hinge results in a swinging--however slight--of the door. But, since the marginal portion of the door opposite the hinges also lies against the front edge of the carcase wall at that point, it is impossible for this margin of the door to swing in the direction of the carcase interior, and instead the door transmits a slight opening movement to the articulation of the hinge. This initial opening movement, however, leads, as described above, to a comparatively sharp lift-away component of movement, which is the cause of the formation of the gap.
It is therefore the object of the invention to design the above-described articulated hinges such that the overlap adjustment can be performed without any marked change of the distance between the inside face of the closed door in the marginal area and the associated front edge of the supporting wall.